r stormed on, sobbing. For a moment she
clawed in vain at something, and then stumbled, as if on her knees, up the
farther bank. Dripping water and puffing steam she climbed to the
high-road again, and, with a bound, started on through spouting mud, as if
nothing had happened. One would have thought her fired by some incentive
as powerful as mine, which forced her on in the face of all difficulties;
and perhaps it was a song of gladness which the motor hummed, as she came
out upon the Vega.

Suddenly the first beams of the sun streamed down the white slopes of the
far Sierra Nevada, touched the vast fertile plain, and wrought magic with
a castled hill which floated up, dreamlike, from a purple haze where a
great city lay asleep. Clustering vermilion towers blazed with the gold of
dawn, and dazzled our eyes with the glamour of romance. For the sleeping
city was Granada, and the red towers and gardens on the castled hill were
the towers and gardens of the Alhambra.

The adventure was over. And under one of those roofs, dove-grey in the
dawn, I hoped that Monica was sleeping.

XXXVI

WILES AND ENCHANTMENTS

In spite of dykes and dams, said Dick, we had arrived at a place to visit
which had once seemed to him as wonderful as finding the key of the
rainbow. Yet here we were; and Granada--after we had entered at last by
crossing still another river--came out from under its spell of enchantment
when we saw it at close quarters. Only that wonderful hill above was
magical still, as magical to the eye as when Ibraham the astrologer
decreed its gardens.

More than half the miradored Moorish houses had given place to modern
French ones; and descendants of the banished owners in far Tetuan and
Tunis, might as well fling their keys and title-deeds away.

The dome of Isabella's cathedral and the towers of old, old churches rose
from among the roofs of commonplace streets; ordinary shops of yesterday
and to-day ran up the steep hill towards the Alhambra; but at a great
gateway--la Puerta de las Granadas, raised by Charles the Fifth--the
centuries opened and let us drive through into the past.

At this hour of the morning, the deep green forest of the Alhambra park,
beyond the classic arch, was still as the enchanted wood which hid from
the world the Sleeping Beauty in her palace. The nightingales had gone to
sleep, and the daylight birds had finished their first concert, but
anothe